No, believe it or not this isn’t a post about Alabama beating Auburn like a rented mule. They did, and I’m happy about it, but that isn’t where I’m headed with this post.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you’ll probably notice that I tend to use it as an outlet for my frustrations. I still blog about things I find funny or for the occasional victory lap, but one of the main themes here seems to be rants. This is a great outlet for that sort of thing because I can get it out without exploding on someone and I can moderate myself a bit to keep from being overly offensive here as well. (That edit feature is great!)

A newsletter I read sometimes had an article the other day about people who keep a journal, and the idea was what difference would it make if we wrote positive things about our spouse versus writing the things we don’t like about them. Now, I don’t rant about my wife here. She is my best friend and my biggest fan, and even though we aren’t still on the honeymoon, we don’t fight enough to count and when we do it is usually over in a few hours (including the “I won’t be the one to talk first” phase. I usually give in first).

This article got me to thinking: When I write negative things here, how does that effect me? Do I get the much needed stress relief from it, or does it feed my negativity? If I took a year and only wrote positive posts, what would it do to my attitude in the rest of my life? What are the benefits and drawbacks to just being positive and disregarding the reality of the bad days I have?

Well, I think I have reached a conclusion on those questions.

I think that while I’m writing it, I get fired up about my negative stuff and really lay it out on the blog. When I get done writing and move on to other things I find that I don’t harbor those feelings as long or as deeply as if I don’t hash it out here. Yes: it does relieve my stress and I think if I only wrote positive things I probably wouldn’t write much. This isn’t because I don’t have positive things in my life, in fact it’s quite the opposite. I probably wouldn’t know what to write about. It also wouldn’t really capture the more authentic moments in my life, and that’s really the goal for the blog.

So, while I think it’s a great thing to focus on the positive things in life, ignoring the frustrations doesn’t really benefit me.

I do agree that it’s better to focus on the things we love about our spouse as opposed to the things that drive us completely insane about them, but in the context of a life journal or blog it just doesn’t make sense to totally ignore those things.

What I am going to do is try to balance my writing a little more. I’m not going to keep a spreadsheet comparing positive vs negative and work some sort of ratio to make sure I’m staying fair, but I am going to try to find more good things to write about.

Maybe do some writing on the new bible study we are about to start in Life Group about marriage and relationships. That should prove to have some positive and definitely some humorous moments!

Oh: ROLL TIDE! (Woohoo! Score one for the positive posts!)

It’s been a great year around the ol’ Plunkett Shack this year. We’ve had ups and downs, but it has been a blessed year all around.

I’m thankful for my beautiful and awesome wife who keeps me in line and makes sure I’m where I need to be, when I need to be there.

We are thankful for our smart, funny, silly little boy who is currently fascinated by the Macy’s parade and is standing in the middle of the floor in his dump truck footie pajamas.

I’m thankful for a job that I don’t hate, that is rewarding and despite some long hours doesn’t make me want to jump off a bridge.

I’m thankful that our family is close, that our love for one another outweighs how crazy we can make each other from time to time.

I’m thankful for the abundance of my life, even though I don’t regularly slow down to realize just how much I have.

Most of all, I’m thankful for a God who loves and watches over me and my family, who gave his son in my place to make it possible for all of these other things to fall into place.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Yep, it is amazing how productive I can be when there aren’t any games on that interest me (Well, Texas Tech v OU is an exception)

I got up at 5 this morning. Today is the opening day of deer season, so I was in my tree stand just after 6am. About 6:45 I saw some movement in the field, and drew up my gun to get ready for ol’ Buck Nelson to walk out in front of me. No such luck. Coyotes.

There is an open season on predators in Alabama, so I drew down on two of them and fired off a couple of rounds. I hit one, missed the other but I didn’t find either one when I got down to go look. A combination of the fact that A) there are coyotes in my field and B) I just made a LOT of noise and scent, there was virtually no chance that a deer would walk out this morning. I stayed in my tree stand until almost 9am before the reality that it was 19 degrees outside overcame my desire to kill the big one.
Ok, so that part of my day wasn’t all that productive.

After eating some breakfast at Mom and Dad’s, I came home and crawled under the house to run a new cable for my HF Radio (ham radio stuff). Ever since this guy came to my church to talk about how he was almost electrocuted underneath a house, getting under there has been really nerve racking for me. Sure, he saw Jesus, but I’m just not there yet ok?

Either way, I got that done and was inside soldering a connector on the cable when my brother called and invited us to go eat. I put the project on hold and went to meet them for a late lunch/early supper. We came home and gave the dog a bath (he’s a little sickly and despite my policy of no animals in the house, he really doesn’t need to be outside with it this cold.) I played with my radio stuff some more and watched Micah jump around like a crazy person for about 3 hours because the dog is in the house.

Now, I’m sitting here watching the end of the Texas Tech v OU game, and even though nothing I did today is of any real consequence, I feel like I have gotten a lot done because I managed to do one thing: relax and not worry about work.

One day at a time.

My last post was all about my first day on call, and how I was hopeful that it wouldn’t be too bad. My day didn’t turn out to be too bad. I ended up back in the server room on Saturday night babysitting a dead server that turned out to be the worst server crash I have ever seen and has managed to make the last week of my life very interesting to say the least.

—— WARNING : GEEK CONTENT AHEAD ——–

So, the RAID 5 volume on the mail server died when one of the other network guys got the bright idea to plug another hard drive in to give us more space. In his defense, it is *supposed* to work that way, but in this case instead of giving us more space, it killed the whole array and gave us NO space… including the space where all the executive’s and department head’s e-mail lived.

Not. Good.

—— Still geeky, but more English resumes here ——

We (and by we, I mean mostly I) spent the whole weekend trying to recover the drives and get a usable server up before Monday morning and in the process recover everyone’s data.  This was particularly urgent because due to some software failures, we didn’t have a good backup of any recent e-mail. As of today, we still don’t have that data back.

I was in the office until about 11pm on Sunday trying to get a new server up so that we could at least have e-mail on Monday morning. Due to the poor state of the network and the fact that the old server was dead, it just wasn’t happening. I cried “uncle” about 10:00, and it took another hour to get things back to a workable state before leaving the office.

I determined on Sunday morning that some users still had some of their e-mail on their computers, so I wrote out some instructions for the other techs and we set about backing up as many of the computers as we could. Meanwhile, we were waiting on the consultants to call us about what the best next move would be, but about 3:30, we just couldn’t wait any longer. I made the call that we needed to blow away the whole email infrastructure and build a new server. At this point, we had been down for about 96 hours, and soon the natives would be getting restless.

Somewhere around 10:30 I got the new server online, handling mail and in the beginning stages of getting it ready for users. One of the other techs came back in to help me get things in the rack, but that turned out to be a bad idea. He decided to take this opportunity to mess with my head a little, and so I left about midnight and proceeded to spend the night having panic attacks. I’m a little prone to those anyway, and I’m sure that being tired didn’t help. EIther way I was back in the office around 9:30 the next morning, started making mailboxes for everyone on the new server. Thankfully, I managed to get out of the office before midnight on Tuesday, but spent most of the day on Wednesday working on the CEO, CFO and various other C-titled people’s computers.

If you think that working on a regular user’s e-mail is stressful, try explaining to the CEO of your company why the e-mail has been down for 120 hours and why we don’t have backups.

Thankfully, today was still hectic but it was really just more about supporting the other techs as they finished up moving everyone’s mailboxes over.

So that has been my week. I hate Microsoft Exchange more now than ever before, but I’ve managed to learn SO much this week. I didn’t mean to, but I think I have set myself up to always be “The Exchange Guy”. There’s one thing about it: as long as they insist on using Exchange, I should have a job!

Today is my first day on call at the new job. Thankfully I’m not on call the whole week. I’m only on call because I swapped a Saturday with another guy so I wouldn’t have to be on call the Saturday before Christmas when my family does all it’s stuff.

Yes, that’s right. I’m on call the entire week of Christmas. It’s the joy of being the low man on the totem pole.
Either way, further proving that when it comes to my hate of Microsoft the feeling is mutual, the Exchange server is down. Thankfully, I’m not the one who broke it. I will, however be the one who has to fix it.  I’m waiting on a status update from the other network guy.
Other than that, this job is going really well. It’s a great environment, it’s a challenge and it’s not all on my shoulders which may be the best part of it all.